And the reviews have been painful: by far the most negative critiques I've seen applied to a piece of work by the director, who this autumn stepped down from the Donmar to pursue a freelance career. (Plans include Evita on Broadway next year.)

The New York Times managed to rise to lukewarm as it sought to explain what it regarded as the production's "timidity". "There is nothing," wrote critic Anthony Tommasini of the production's opening night on 13 October, "particularly gripping about Mr Grandage's work here."

A major problem – acknowledged by all of the critics – was that the production was hit by a last-minute disaster. Mariusz Kwiecien, due to sing Don Giovanni, suffered back pain in the dress rehearsal and required an operation for a herniated disc. His role was taken by Peter Mattei at the last minute.

When I saw the production, on 25 October, I had a significant advantage over audiences for the first three performances: Kwiecien was back in the saddle.

And it feels as though I saw rather a different show from the one that opened earlier in the month.

Grandage's productions do not rely on heady conceptual effects. He'll rarely take a production out of period dress. You could, if you like, call them traditional. And yet at its best his work has at its heart an extremely nuanced and intelligent sense of the interaction between characters, which in turn relies on careful and precise work with performers. It's this kind of delicate work that would, I imagine, be lost when a replacement Don – not even the understudy but a baritone working at the Met on another production at the time – was inserted into the show.

And what I felt that Grandage had really succeeded in doing was establishing a fascinating relationship between his (newly healthy) Don and his Leporello (Luca Pisaroni). Here was a thoroughly queasy-making folie à deux, tinged by class and sexual envy, and by a servant's mingled loyalty and scorn for a master. There was good work, too, in the class-ridden drama between the Don and the young servant-class bride, Zerlina (Mojca Erdmann), whom he violently courts in the face of her fiancé's impotent rage.

None the less, the production was not Grandage at his very best – that being exemplified, I would say, by his operatic debut last year, a crushingly intense production of Billy Budd at Glyndebourne, which left me wanting to never see the opera again, not because it wasn't a masterful piece of directing, but rather because it left me so hollowed-out. Don Giovanni, by contrast, felt a little too much like international opera stars acting familiar, signature roles in much the same way as they always do, whether in Vienna, Paris or London: the detail and nuance that Grandage usually brings to his work seemed not to have stuck, quite. (Mark Shenton's blog for the Stage has some intelligent speculation on why this may be.)

But audiences around the world will be able to make up their own minds, since Don Giovanni – with Kwiecien singing, all being well – is due for live HD broadcast in cinemas on 29 October. And the critics did seem to agree on one thing: the singing was terrific.